Knowing When to Stop

I was tangling the other day and Birdie commented, “You ruined it. You just don’t know when to stop.” That got me to thinking. How do you know when to stop tangling? I mean on any given tile. Not that we would want to stop tangling altogether!

I did a quick search and found the following quote by Dan Rockwell: “It takes more courage to stop than to start. Anyone can start something new. It takes real leaders to stop something old.” As a struggling perfectionist, I can relate to this. I keep thinking that if I just work a little more on something, I can make it better. Often times, this is not the case. I know he was talking about things on a much higher level, like dumping bad habits to make room for new and better ones, but I think it might apply here as well.

I will sometimes spend significantly longer on my “bad” tiles than on my “good” ones. Sometimes I can turn them around, but sometimes not. So the question of the day is how long do you work on a tangle that is not turning out as you’d like? When do you quit and move on to the next?

By the way, here is the tile Birdie was talking about. I happen to disagree with her. I like it. I did my tangling with a sepia pen then shaded with a Prismacolor French Gray 90%. Then I added some Prismacolor gold.